Today we had Helena from the Computer Science Department come talk to us for half of the session about the Digital Wildfire project. The young women had the opportunity to engage with her on issues of digital citizenship and share their experiences of using social media. They reflected together on what being “a good digital citizen” might mean in the context of social media, and what they would do if they came across inflammatory context posted on a social media site. Helena introduced the competition that Digital Wildfire is currently holding and encouraged the Go Girls to enter the competition and submit some of their individual projects, which are tailored to Digital Wildfire. The competition deadline is on the 10th of December so our young women have two more weeks to finish their projects and we’ll be sure to share them with you here as well.

In the second half of the session, we finished the job fair documentary which we will be posting on the blog shortly so do check it out when you can. The documentary will be used as part of a project showcase run by the university’s IT services tomorrow. A few of our young women will also be there to talk about the project.

Everything is progressing nicely and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone’s finished projects. Next week we will be focusing on finishing the projects so they can add final touches and revisions in our last session before we go on break.

At a glance

go_girl: code+create is a project at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, run in partnership with the Oxfordshire County Council's Early Intervention Service. In line with Oxford’s targets in its Access Agreement with the Office for Fair Access, this interdisciplinary project complements existing programmes aimed at widening access to the University of Oxford, but tackles the problem in a fundamentally new way using technology. The research was originally supported by the University of Oxford IT Innovation Challenges Seed Fund and has received subsequent funding from Goldman Sachs Gives.